I once asked Claude which historical figure I resembled
It said Robert Louis Stevenson, on the grounds that we had both left an established life for a highland town on the far side of the world, and that our best work arrived after we did.
That is flattering, which means it needs auditing. A comparison that only flatters is a eulogy with the paperwork still pending, and the paperwork turns out to be where the two of us overlap most.
The man and the move
Stevenson came from a family of lighthouse engineers, a trade whose entire purpose is to stand in one place and warn other people. He declined it, read law, and became a writer instead, which is the same job with fewer guarantees that the light stays on. In his thirties he went hunting for a climate his lungs could survive, through Davos, the south of France and Saranac Lake. He left Britain for good in 1887. In 1890 he bought about four hundred acres above Apia in Samoa, built a house called Vailima, which means five rivers, and lived there until a cerebral haemorrhage killed him in December 1894. He was forty-four.
I left Adelaide for Đà Lạt, Vietnam in May 2025. I am now more than twenty years older than Stevenson was when he died, which is the first place the comparison wobbles, and not the last.
Where we match
Both of us walked off the approved path. I left school unfinished, did six years in the Royal Australian Air Force, then spent five years in England trying to become the next Sting and/or Thomas Dolby. The experiment was conclusive: confidence does not equal competence (conf≠comp, n=1). I started at the University of Surrey at thirty-four and studied psychology the long way round, which is the only way round available to a man who has already tried the short one.
Both of us also got renamed by the people who took us in. The Samoans called Stevenson Tusitala, teller of tales. The chiefs he had stood by during their imprisonment built him a road they named the Road of the Loving Heart, and when he died about two hundred Samoans cut a path up Mount Vaea to bury him. In Đà Lạt I am Grandpa. The whole Vietnamese family says it, almost always in English. My wife and I call each other husband and wife, because in my Vietnamese household we name people by their position in the family rather than by their given name, so the word is an endearment and a street address at once. Stevenson got a road. I got a title that needs no paving, which is cheaper for everyone, the road crew included.
We each arrived with a family attached. Stevenson followed an American divorcée ten years his senior across an ocean and a continent, married her in 1880, and acquired her children, one of whom, Lloyd, went on to co-write novels with him. I married into a Vietnamese family, which is a larger operation than a stepson and comes with no co-writing credit.
We each hand the pages to the household, too. Stevenson left his writing at Fanny’s bedside each night for her to critique, and by her biographer’s account he relied on her judgement. My wife reads my draft chapters in Vietnamese translation, which makes her the only editor I have who receives my arguments after they have already been through customs. Whatever survives the crossing has earned its place. Whatever doesn’t was probably an Australian idiom travelling without papers.
Where we don’t
Stevenson arrived rich and famous. Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Jekyll and Hyde were all in print, and by 1887 the books had made him considerable money. I arrived with an imprint I run myself, which means my publisher has never rejected a manuscript of mine and has never paid me an advance, the publisher being me.
Vailima made the money matter. The house, and the extended household living in it, cost enough that Stevenson felt pushed to keep writing, and in 1893 he reported sitting at his desk to write, rewrite and destroy, and to “rage at my own impotence,” from six in the morning until eight at night. I am currently weighing whether to build or rent. Stevenson answered the same question with four hundred acres and a mansion. The question stays the same at every altitude of ego.
Then there are the officials. Stevenson wrote A Footnote to History, an account of colonial muddle subtitled Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa, and for a time feared it would get him deported. I wrote a long run of emails about a Pentax GPS accessory that receives signals and transmits nothing, and which spent nine weeks in Vietnamese customs while I was asked for a quality certificate that FedEx later confirmed an individual importer cannot obtain. His book covered eight years. Mine covered nine weeks, and it needed less research, since the correspondence was the research. The universe, as far as I can tell, keeps a desk at the end of every escape route, staffed by a person with a stamp and no memory of who sent you.
Then there is the diagnosis. Stevenson lived and died under the label of tuberculosis. At Saranac Lake the physician who ran the sanatorium could not find the bacillus in his sputum, doctors since have proposed bronchiectasis, sarcoidosis and a hereditary bleeding disorder, and what killed him in the end was a haemorrhage in the brain. Nobody can diagnose him now, which has not stopped anyone proposing. I lived for most of my life under a bipolar label before AuDHD turned out to fit far better. Stevenson also wrote the most famous story about two natures sharing one body. I wrote an essay about two nervous systems sharing one steering wheel. His has been adapted for stage and screen ever since. Mine has a comments section.
What the move actually did
Here is the finding of the audit. The story we tell about people like Stevenson, and the one Claude told about me, runs: change your environment, find peace, do the work. The Samoan years contradict the middle step. Stevenson got an estate to run, a household to feed, a colonial dispute to write about and officials who wanted him quiet. He did not escape interruption. He upgraded it, from a lung that interrupted him to consuls, chiefs and a mansion. The work arrived regardless: the South Seas tales, the Footnote, and Weir of Hermiston, which many readers rate his finest and which he wrote about Scotland from the far side of the planet.
A change of environment is a change in who gets to interrupt you. In Đà Lạt my interruptions are a customs department, a formal complaint about the neighbourhood karaoke, and a fog that comes off the hills early in the morning and again by four most afternoons. The work turned up regardless, which is the only evidence I have that the move did anything. Whether it is my best work is not a verdict a man should deliver while the karaoke is still going.
If you are planning to move your way into a better life, budget for the officials. A move hands you better problems in more interesting weather, and most people who go find that a fair trade.
Stevenson was working on Weir of Hermiston the day he died, and it stops where he stopped. I am on book six of nine of The Expat Psychologist series. The karaoke is, as ever, in session.
References
Brigham Young University–Hawaii, Office of the President. (n.d.). Building roads of the loving heart. https://president.byuh.edu/pacific-ponderings/building-roads-of-the-loving-heart
Chorba, T. (2021). Strange case of a sojourn in Saranac. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 27(3), 994–995. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2703.AC2703
Frommer’s. (n.d.). Famous people in Samoa. https://www.frommers.com/destinations/samoa/in-depth/famous-people/
Hopkins, L. (2026, July 28). The document I was never allowed to have. Quiet Half. https://quiethalf.com/p/the-document-i-was-never-allowed
Kirkus Reviews. (2024, August 13). A wilder shore: The romantic odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson by Camille Peri [Review]. https://kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/camille-peri/a-wilder-shore
Luscombe, S. (n.d.). Robert Louis Stevenson on Samoa, 1890. The British Empire. https://www.britishempire.co.uk/maproom/samoa/stevensonsamoa1890.htm
National Endowment for the Humanities. (2015, July/August). Treasure Island author Robert Louis Stevenson was a sickly man with a robust imagination. Humanities. https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/julyaugust/feature/treasure-island-author-robert-louis-stevenson-was-sickly-man-robu
Robert Louis Stevenson Website. (n.d.). Samoa and Vailima. https://robert-louis-stevenson.org/samoa-and-vailima/
Stevenson, R. L. (1892). A footnote to history: Eight years of trouble in Samoa. Cassell.
Stevenson, R. L. (1893). Life in Samoa, continued, January 1893–December 1894. In The letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (Vol. 2, chap. 12). Wikisource. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Letters_of_Robert_Louis_Stevenson_Volume_2/Chapter_XII